In the Starlight
by Closet
Summary: "Walkers don't think enough to see past all those pretty lights. They look at the stars and move in one place trying to get 'em. As long as they think they have a reason, they'll keep moving. Just like you and I." Wherein the world after the walkers is much more simple than it should be.
1. Calcite Asteroids

**[1/2] Calcite Asteroids**

The walker's chewed-off lips keep its teeth exposed to the chilly air, so it isn't much of a shock that the teeth that grip my wrist are colder than murder. My sleeves are pulled to the knuckles to fend off the cold, and I don't look down; don't resist the red soreness that rolls like a parasite in my spine.

When I wrench the walker's head from my body, the first thing I notice is the temperature of its rotting skin; the lack of blood rushing from a heart with swift speed and pulsing heat. The skin of a walker feels almost artificial, like rubber, taking on the temperature of whatever day it is when you happen to touch it. Beats me why I can't seem to ever get used to that. Something on the inside always gets a shock when I touch the angry skin and see the gnashing teeth and watch a walker's eyes, dead, black, assault me with a _hunger_ that couldn't be more alive.

It makes me hurt. Makes me think.

And the thoughts that come to my head are things I can tell that people like Molly would never really take a look at. But we'd all be lying if we said we hadn't ever seen the eyes of a walker - seen its laugh lines; its pained expression - and quietly wondered what its name had been before all this. We'd be avoiding our own humanity if we denied having imagined its skin intact and its cheeks flushed under the sun of a hot summer day, their family brushing kisses onto their heads or their children stringing their arms around their waist and saying "I love you, so and so," or, "hey, uncle Jared, I think you're pretty cool even though you ate the last slice of pizza at my birthday party last year."

Strange, isn't it, that we live in a world where it's irresponsible - not profound - to think about the past. A world where our history is as doomed as the present and future of the humans who made it.

I slam my boot straight down onto its head one time - but then I have to repeat it again and again 'cause it keeps lifting back up on its ripped elbows. I can't help the grunts that leave me when the skull continues popping against the cement with a sick grinding noise once; twice; three times, each time rising back up and shaking a little harder.

My foot hits the walker's mouth and breaks bone where it lands, teeth spewing from red gums and clicking onto the sidewalk, sprinkling blood where they roll under tires and into gutters. When I yank in a breath, my body refuses the air. I just gasp. And then I choke. The walker's jaw droops to the pavement and a mouth of smooth red flesh stares at me as it lifts its head from a pool of its own skin and blood.

"Just fucking die," I say. Though the world declines to stir or take heed, I hear my voice for far too long like hammers in the dark of my skull. The gruff voice shivers in an echo, reaching abandoned cars and vacant churches two blocks away, stretching into a lingering whisper. The words I've just said have no train of thought behind them, but they push me out of my own body with shock anyways. My foot has stomped down again without me even knowing, and blood crests around the rubber sole; splashes like cold milk against my ankle. My own mind locks me out and my body takes charge, so my leg bears down again and it's almost like I can't even tell what my instincts are doing anymore.

I just hurt. The image of the walker's skull flattening into the crimson puddle pushes me farther away. I'd like to think I'm the kind of guy who can stop myself long enough to pull my shit together, but I hear my charging breaths and feel the groan of pain inside my bones and I know I'm not the man I used to be.

Funny, such a term would be referred to as a cliche in what one might call the Old Days. There isn't a moment when I touch my face that I don't feel the hair and feel the mud against my skin with some kind of disbelief. Feeling the skin as it peels from my lips, I see myself minus a year standing barefoot on the tile of a bathroom that belonged to me, deciding whether brushing my teeth is really worth the time. But back then, I could afford to worry about things like that. Back then, I saw the wrinkles in my skin and the largeness of the pores in my flesh like I'd been holding a magnifying glass to the flaws. Nowadays when I find the time, I just touch my face instead and the creases in my skin are so much deeper than I'd thought possible. My hair, to the touch, is overgrown steel wool matted with fragments of other people's flesh.

Exhaustion stops that restless drill that's been hammering my bones, and it gives me a moment to think. Under the drone of hundreds of swarming thoughts, I hear a sound that is an awful lot like color and hurt. It plays music the color red, spinning on a record inside my mind, skipping, tilting to the left and to the right, and I can't keep the disk steady enough to understand the words that it keeps saying. My hands fall to my knees and my lungs hurt when they spew cold air, spraying phlegm and blood behind my teeth. I let my back give in and curve beneath the ache; let my eyes fall to the ground as I heave my chest like an asthmatic, overweight outcast who's lost their fiftieth game of tag. God. Let me breathe a little.

The drill in my head and the quiet, buzzing excruciation in my neck pull at me - they pull at my hands and beg to be rubbed, but I can't feel my wrist well enough to make it move. My elbow and my arm are numb. I can't feel my hand well enough to hold my grip on my own leg, and, shifting my weight to the other arm, it takes me longer than I'd like to understand just why I'm facing this problem.

Clementine's white duck-bill hat slips from the hand and falls to the ground, where old blood on the fabric covers itself with fresh red when it smacks into the puddle. I flail, reaching for the hat, and my mind is in the middle of a race too overwhelming to understand the blood that seeps into my shirt from its newly-stained bill. I murmur, and something rises up inside of my chest and billows from my throat in hyperventilated breaths, louder than is safe, quieter than my mind wants. "Shit!"

The bite is in the form of five deep marks in the inside and outside of my wrist, and I scrub at it like it's profanity on a wall or a row of wrong answers on a test. An itch irritates the inside of my flesh, the bite crusting up along the wounds in a fluffy white paste - a sheer contrast to my natural pigment - and I wipe it with the other sleeve, but it's over with. "Jesus - God." The frenetic scrubbing of the wound and the bite of my nails into the scars irritate it more. Fresh, new, black blood spurts around the corners of the teeth marks like a border; capitalizes on the burn like a picture frame. "This wasn't supposed to happen. Fuck. Fuck - it won't work, it won't work." These words are piling atop my tongue and escaping my throat in whimpers soggy with tears, burdened with more anger than sadness.

I hold Clementine's hat close to my chest. It's almost like feeling her hair on my chin in the middle of a hug or her hands holding tight on my shoulders, afraid of a fall during a piggy-back ride. The tears on my neck remind me just how far I am from holding her ever again, and it's too much to ask of myself not to wrinkle the flimsy white hat, tightening my fingers into a fist. Held against my chest, the hat slows my heart.

When I was a boy, my mom would tell me all about how I would turn out to be a man who listened closely to his emotions. She said that this emotional tendency evoked vivid daydreams in even the strongest of men. My brother used to call them fantasies. Riding in the backseat of my dad's car, he would read his books and glance at me 'cause I always just… looked around. A few years ago, he told me how much it scared him when I did that. He wasn't able to see inside my head. He didn't witness the pictures that were being drawn in my brain; didn't understand that with my mind, I could make our front lawn become an ocean and our dad's lawn mower become a pirate ship.

We weren't the kind of brothers who pretended the carpet was on fire together, jumping from chair to chair and breaking our mother's furniture. He kept the straight face and left me to do most of the talking back and breaking rules. I had a few years on him, but that didn't exactly stop him from taking the position he knew was his: ' Most Responsible Everett Child'. And neither of us really minded the backwards ranking. Most Sunday afternoons, he was most likely smiling at me from over his comic books while he watched me eat down whole bowls of ice cream.

It makes it hard not to think about that now. Standing in the middle of a sidewalk in Savannah is about the most imbecilic thing I think any survivor can do, but my eyes catch the cloud-obscured sun and my legs freeze - just like that. I watch the light burn away at the sky; watch it move against the buildings; feel the air against my unshaved face with a shiver of discomfort.

There's a pain inside my head like the music of a military band playing the march of an army within the closed-off center of my mind, a cacophonous pain that breaks my vision into blurred shadows and unfocused shapes. My eyes close and shutter the world in a more complete black than the injured vision that had just begun to stave off the light. My thoughts suffocate the space inside my head and grow heavier, expanding, becoming painful where where pain does not belong. The feeling of falling cripples the air in my throat; whistles of breeze snap beneath my clothing, peeling blood from my chest where the red had glued the fabric. My lungs wheeze air from the raw flesh of my parched throat, throwing phlegm from my mouth and onto the cold concrete when my chest hits the ground like a boulder.

She'd told me I always dreamed more often in the light than in the dark, my mom did. It was a thing I'd never understood, and I chalk that up now to the usual difficulty kids face when made to grasp deep things at that age. She said she could always tell that I was dreaming by the way my eyes went vacant, going dark and reflective so she could watch the imaginations play on the surface of my eyes like a film on a movie screen. The light and heat of the sun are cold and far away, and my skin has lost its touch; my eyes can't see color anymore. The dark in my head at this moment is not the dark seen when someone shuts their eyes to block out the light; it's the kind of darkness that makes it feel as if the light had never existed.

And on this black canvas, the dull ache in my skull is the activity which stirs my dream to life.

I feel the discomfort in my stomach before my body registers anything else at all. While this whole issue is, by nature, peculiar, even the shadowy color of the grass below me is noticed too late, and it's even longer before I realize that I've been tied to it. My face is stuck to the ground where thick soil sticks to my skin and fills my mouth, lining my teeth with an impenetrable wreath of grime. The grass is short, stubby. It's sharp. The sky is more like a tarp pulled over my head, dark, like the sun is behind it and the heavens are far above, making the dead wind taste as if I'm breathing inside a plastic bag. My first instinct is to call for help, but my mouth defies my brain and moves to the words 'where am I? God, please.' The grass is bristle-like under my stomach, vomit forcing its way up my throat, and in this dream I don't have a voice. The rumble of my vocal chords pushes the bile further.

I try to move. It would seem to be the most logical of choices. When I wring my arms from their bindings - try to - the ground throws vines from the soil like they're beanbags at a state fair. Everything clenches on me, pulling my legs and arms and hands so I can use them no longer. My kicks have been stifled and my skin boils with sweat beneath the heat of the stuffy air. I'm pressed into the black meadow and my nose catches whiffs of the sickly mud caked onto my face, the bottoms of my eyes perceiving the soft pink of worms wriggling in the dirt.

When the world changes, it's sudden, but I don't feel the pain as soon as it all happens. The grass against my skin peels into a glittering ocean of razors and knives. I see my own hurt more than I feel it. My mind takes me back to a cool, wet porch, and I see mom telling me all those things about my imagination. I find peace in the lines that border the sweetness in her eyes. And then I see the pain again - I see it in the red that leaks from my skin, skittering onto the needles and staining them an angry color. I see it in the dark, purple skin that bleeds streams around the blade of a butcher knife. When I scream, my saliva tastes like the mud that stops my breaths; the vomit that burns my insides tastes like poison and water and something so heavy, my neck pops at its weight.

The tarp is pulled off.

I'm not where I was. I can prove this by the darkening of the sky and the coldness of the location, but why use such lacking information as evidence when I can just tell you that the elbow of a stranger is pressed into my chest so hard that my lungs can't breathe? My tongue is dry; heavy. I have trouble believing that it belongs to me until I feel the pain of it being pressed against my teeth. A remnant of the dream makes itself known to me when I choke on something cloth-like and coarse - something that limits the noise that can be heard when my mouth, against orders, begins violently cursing. My other arm - the unbitten one; the good one - is pressed into my spine against the sidewalk, and I feel my own grunt of pain bang a mallet on the inside of my chest. My elbow, my hand, my whole arm feels like the gravel on the street has been ripping holes into my skin.

The sky seems almost black, but I can tell that my eyes are defying me. The world is a plain of darkness with splotches of color atop it, making everything look and feel like the messy aftermath of a child's first discovery of the wonders of paint. The darkness is fitting for the temperature of the street, and so the coldness of my skin and body comes almost naturally. I wheeze into the cloth when the elbow digs in again, and it seems to be just what I needed to get a better gauge of the surroundings in my area. Not two feet away from my face, there's a road painted with a yellow stripe that reminds me of a roadrunner in an old cartoon. The tail of a sewer rat vanishes into a gutter. Blood, haze, cold. A wheel, a car, a moon, a shadow of black emitting heat as it looms halfway over me. A walker remains behind the foreign body, its head caved in and its teeth strewn in what looks to be tar.

A murmur consumes the static wind and my arm feels like ice. I'm held down, and when I fight against it, something pushes on my head, digging into my skin with sweaty fingertips. The cold stripe on the skin of my arm reminds me of a doctor's wipe; of antiseptic being pressed to the skin of a child before a shot during a doctor's visit. It's gone for a moment, and the cold numbness of disease piles into my nerves, tingling me with this itch. God. The cold - that stinging antiseptic - is removed by dullness of the bite, and just for a second, my eyelids break open and I spot the nose of the rat again, peeking from the sewer and dying his paw red with blood on the concrete.

My thoughts, in this moment, don't _think_. As if they struggle to dodge the implications of the haze, words pile into the forefront of my brain and tell me something I should've considered a long time ago: nothing about anything _feels_ right. The dream is gone. The emptiness - the black breathlessness of the world beneath the tarp - it all remains. I know I've seen this place before. It's burnt into the inside of my head.

The voice overhead talks louder now, and the thing that strikes me in the chest with cold fear is how unrecognizable the tone is.

The needle hits me, but no-one speaks a words of comfort. The metal takes the vein deep, driving itself into my flesh in the form of a blade, cold, ripping bone and skin and meat and slamming back down when my body resists its intrusion. Another grunt; another smash. The pain; heat; cold; itch; scream - they all mix together and torment my mind, ripping a scream from my throat that torments my skin and send blood slamming forward to wet the back of my arid tongue. I smell the blood. The stench brews a heavy sickness in my gut. Heat: on the side of my face, in my senses, all inside my mind, uninvited and killing every thought my head can pull from its depths.

I remember always being told that I would be capable of telling the difference between death and unconsciousness whenever either of them happened. Unconsciousness is a sparing, fleeting thing. Blackness and stress kill the color in the world; mute it all like a blanket over a painting at a museum whose final hours have been met. Death comes in sparkles and lights which all wash out reality and dip the present in a thing that looks an awful like the end. In death, pain becomes dread. Dread becomes anxiety. Anxiety becomes stillness. Stillness becomes quiet.

And the quiet is a different thing immeasurable in terms of emotion, becoming something equally indescribable in all of its varieties. It becomes a peace that is foreign to the world and everything inside it; a bliss that shimmers red-white and glows inside and out.

No sound. No moon. No stars lead to me through the night.

 _"Must be time to turn out the lights, Clem."_

 _"Can they see me?" Bubbling and frantic, yet patient. Too much trust._

 _"See you?"_

 _"The... w-walkers. Can they see the flashlight?"_

 _"No reason for them not to. But can they see the stars?"_

 _"...Y-yeah. I think."_

 _"Then they'll be too distracted."_

 _"But if they can see the stars, then that means - that means they can see my flashlight, too!" Louder than her voice is the echoing 'click'. Louder than that is the sudden reign of darkness._

 _"They don't think enough to see it out of all those lights. They don't really understand what they're following." A forefinger traces a trail of heads through the gap in the curtains. It presses a line to the window through which the bumbling black skulls emit deep noises in the dark. "See? They look at the stars and move in one place trying to get 'em. As long as they have a reason, they'll keep on moving. Just like you and I."_

 _"So they won't see me with my flashlight? I'm safe?"_

 _"As long as you're far away from them. You just can't get too close."_

 _Her eyes get larger in the dark. Somehow even through the pulled-tight curtains, the moon manages to reflect inside the brown disks, still and blue. "I can't get too close," she repeats. "And if I do, I'm not safe."_

 _"If you're with me, the walkers can't get you, sweet pea. I'll keep you safe. Even if you get too close."_

 _"Even if I get too close." She says it again in quieter breaths until the words are drowned in sleep. Her chin droops onto her chest._

Even if you get too close.


	2. Onyx Comets

**[2/2] Onyx Comets**

I don't feel well. There's an emptiness in this darkness behind my eyes — a sort of void that strikes me as odd seeing as I've never viewed the dark in this way before. Even as a boy, when the lights were off and the bottom bunk was completely black, I would feel the darkness like it was hovering on top of me. I could never see through it or past it. It was always breathing on the back of my neck when I turned to face the wall or pulled our mom's quilt over my eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. The darkness always felt palpable; like I could reach out and touch it; like it would glide away if I came too close.

But in this dark, there's nothing. There's nothing in the sound, either, but the hollow, shuffling steps of a number of bodies moving beneath me in some kind of synchrony, like the consequences of a misstep are too grave to comprehend.

Nothing feels the same anymore. Is everything alright? Where did I leave my life off? On the sidewalk, standing, rubbing at my wrist, pleading with God for the scars and their pus and their itch to be removed from my flesh? Am I where I stood when I dropped Clementine's hat to the ground and pulled it up again, holding it to my chest to quiet the erratic pulsing of my blood? Am I still on the ground, struggling against the elbows and hands pinning me to the concrete? Could be.

The world keeps keeps on moving.

I don't feel good. My brain feels as if it's rattling inside my skull, getting bruised against the bone and bleeding thick seas of red from each place it's struck. My ears feel about to implode. It's like the pressure of all the burdens in the world is pushing in on them. All my nerves are straining and pulling, screaming with the tug of muscles I hadn't recognized to this extent before in my life. There's force exerting itself all over my body. Bruises and pains spike through my legs, shoulders, lower back, abdomen, ankles, neck. My arm.

I can't think straight, so I choose not to dwell on that jewel of thought for too long, lest my mind become so hooked on it that the pain comes storming at me. The light of the stars wavers overhead when I peel my vision open and see the deep blue of the night toss and roil in a storm of active color and wind, though everything in the sky seems as still as it's ever been. It's the fences and grass and bushes and soil which writhe and spin and run like they've all lost their minds. It's all motion to me. It's all the same as what I saw when my eyes were closed and my head was killing me and the smell of my blood was so strong that I nearly choked on it.

Two arms squeeze themselves around me like the bars of a prison door. Broad shoulders and a slim back hold me level and there are hands of a second person on my legs — hands with their wrists hidden by light blue sleeves that are part of a hoodie. They hold the bottom half of me with a tightness that tells me they don't intend to let go, the figure walking steadily backward, carrying my sore body down a sidewalk like I'm the second half of a loveseat on moving day. The blue hood is down around a dark-skinned neck and blood is smeared lightly across it from the pulling and twisting of walker hands. Smoky navy mountaintops with snowy peaks decorate the front of the hood and shout boldly in yellow capitals "DENVER NUGGETS," a thing which makes my inner sports fanatic — 'Old Days Lee' — chuckle a little.

There's a dagger clenched between the teeth of the guy, the blade held in place by his teeth and his lips. Something in his eyes catches my attention; tells me that there's a damn good reason he isn't on his own in any of this. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who would handle himself well on his lonesome even with the strength in his arms and the youth in his eyes. He's an early-twenty-something who looks like the kind of person who'd achieve celebrity status from his 'tall 'n dark' looks and end up renaming himself something intentionally humorous before falling into a perpetual state of sort-of fame.

He casts his eyes up at the one holding my torso before taking his eyes away, pulling them to the sidewalk behind him. The night is dark. The face up above mine is hidden in the same overwhelming shadow which covers the streets and veils the bodies of walkers in the night, twisting right and left with their eyeless faces angled toward the stars. He's got his black hair woven into decorated braids that hang in unclean rows down his shoulders, and I see beads hanging off the ends of them — reds, yellows, blues, whites — just those colors repeating in the corners of my eyes.

I pull myself against their hands, but either their grip is too tough or my muscles are too weak. My legs drops to the cement when I wrench my ankle from Nuggets' hands, and his eyes go wide as he grabs me again, steeling himself. He'd almost run into the splinters of a fallen electrical pole. He opens his mouth to the motions of a silent 'motherfuck' and glares like I've lost my mind.

"What the fuck — who the fuck are you?" I say, and my voice is low, gravely, hushed, but it echoes in the street as if I'd yelled it. A hand slams over my mouth and shuts it tight. Beneath my nose, the skin of his palm smells like the blood in the dream I'd had: coppery and thick. I jerk out of the hold on my mouth and the feet below me come to a stop as if something's in their way — a truck, a door, some magical rainbow river of the Gods or some shit. Regardless, I don't find myself giving a fuck. "Kenny! Chri —"

"Stop this. Please. I'm not playing around." It's spoken in a breath an octave higher than a whisper, falling from lips that are so close to the side of my head, I can feel the heat on my ear. There's an accent curling around the words and the hair dangling near my eyes shifts a little bit more, the beads catching the light of the moon. Something about the voice catches me off-guard, like it's honeyed or too soft to be natural.

"Who the hell are you? Did you take my pistol, asshole?" The _question_ is my intention. The insult is less purposeful and more of a spur-of-the-moment 'my heart made me do it' kind of move, as generally such vocabulary would be out of use for me on the day-to-day. I feel guilty at the thought of Clem's brows wrinkling in disapproval, but there's some sort of a release involved in cursing the hell out of someone.

I see his eyes shifting up above me, larger, more burdened than those of the one with the Nuggets jacket, and they carry an indiscernible light color that strikes the dark. He looks up at the other man and creases his brows, confusion painting his brown-skinned face. "I saw no pistol."

The jacket-clad one holds his stare, mouth agape, the moon making his teeth glitter in an odd way, and I wonder when in the hell these guys managed to find toothpaste. He breathes heavily once and readjusts my legs in his arms. "No big deal," he says, and the tone of his voice indeed makes things seem a-okay. "He probably can't use it."

I kick my leg in his grasp, but it makes any and all of my argument lose its punctuation. The movement is weak and strained and a grunt leaves my lips when the pain meets the shoulder of my bitten arm and fucks everything up. "I can do whatever the fuck I want, motherfucker. Get off me and just let me go back where I came from." The last sentence seems to miss its mark completely. Something else has gotten their attention — something distant or near or in the middle of both. "Drop me. I said drop me — _now_!"

"You _really_ want me to drop you?" The one with the jacket has stopped and his eyes are on me now, devoting their complete attention, filtered black and silver by the stars. There's dense frustration in the wrinkles on his forehead and in the twist of his mouth. "You don't actually want me to fucking _drop_ you, do you?"

The one whose arms are around my torso loosens his grip a little at this. "Dwayne," he grits. It's a single bitten threat, and it comes from the mouth whose breath is still on my neck like fire. His hold shifts just enough that I can feel my lighter arm drop to point at the ground, and I'm allowed just one hard look at it all before the pain comes jolting back. It isn't there anymore, bold and invisible and empty; as stark as a puzzle board with all of its center pieces taken from it.

The voices are distant things filtered by the image of the stars, and my eyelids feel heavy. It's a struggle to stay awake long enough to understand the things that are being said. Words come in, jagged and hoarse — a half-sentence drowned by the dark. "— they probably know don't where the fuck we are right now," says the one with his grip on my legs. His eyes smooth left and right over the streets with pale movements. "I don't know where we are or where the hell we're even going."

"We knew this would happen," the other responds, and I _feel_ him say it as I hear it through the groans of walkers on the road nearby. It's like experiencing the words twice; three times. " _No_ -one can be expected to plan for everything, Dwayne, not even you."

There's something present in the way the accented voice drops an octave lower at the end, becoming borderline sympathetic. There's a history between them, I can tell, but my mind is on the stench of walker guts that emanates from their bodies, and I focus a little too much on my stomach's desire to vomit on the concrete.

The tone of voice is something that Dwayne pauses for a moment to consider, but he's back on top of the one with the braids again, whisper-shouting, "You're right — we _knew_ this would fucking happen. Saw him get bit, thought twice about our own shit that we had to take care of, and saved him anyway. And why, Jordon?" He's almost yelling now. I feel my legs being dropped, my body being hefted, and I'm held over the shoulder of the one with the braids when I learn I'm helpless to leave if they don't want it.

"Why?" he repeats. "It's 'cause you couldn't get your mind over the hump. This man was dead just like they all are back home right now." He sounds like he's pacing and wiping his hands on his clothes in frustration. "We're about to die, too, 'cause of him."

"We wouldn't be happy with ourselves," Jordon tells him, and his voice is steady but it quickly loses its cool as if feeding on the light of the stars and the walkers' screams and the shadow of night and reality. "Leaving would have been a bad idea when we both knew that we could keep him alive! You _know_ that. Don't pretend that you don't understand. You helped. You picked him up; you held him down; you talked to him to keep him from hurting us. You are —" he gulps "— _just_ as guilty."

"I did that for you," says Dwayne. He situates his hood over his head, but the sweat on his face still catches the sheen of moon like wax. If he's attempting to bring a dark to his eyes or an opaqueness to the softening of his emotions, no change is made at all. His thoughts are embedded in his brows and his mouth; in the way his lips turn down and his chest shrinks like he hasn't taken a breath. "Ryan wouldn't have wanted us to save this guy and Beth wouldn't have given a damn whether we'd saved him or shot him in the ass so long as we brought food back to the station. I figured maybe I could fix something if I helped you." He takes his hands from his pockets and the palms are light-colored and cold under the stars' weight. "Thought maybe I could... do something to change us. I mean — shit. _'This.'_ "

There's a short silence that lasts as long as it takes for a single breath to be drawn into Jordan's lungs, smoothing from his mouth like a word was almost placed upon it, meaningful but retracted too soon to be heard in his voice. "Let's just take him back to Beth."

Dwayne fiddles in the pocket of his jacket, wringing his hands beneath the air-sogged blue fabric. "She's probably dead, don't you think?" he says, and it's stated like a row of numbers in a list or the order of the letters in the alphabet: A, B, C, D. 'D' is for _dead,_ boys and girls, and the lesson is over for this afternoon. "The prison had more than half of the city's walkers when we left. That was dawn — five o'clock, before the clouds were up and covering the sun. The coverage only lasted 'till around eleven."

There are trees overhead, parting for the starlight that illuminates old soil on the ground near a bench in the dark. There's pain in my chest, breath whistling through my lungs in the form of a groan that shatters my mind. When I'm sat down on the bench, I almost consider high-tailing it the hell away, but I remain there, unafraid and untroubled in the dark under the whirl of their conversation. My bones can hardly move. My chin drifts down to my chest, warm skin touching the cool buttons of my shirt, and every muscle scorches with a feeling like lightning in my nerves.

Jordon's voice is a sound I almost don't pick up. "We can run over there tonight, Dwayne; see if they made it through."

There's a shift in the eyes of the one with the blue jacket, like his thoughts are more reflective, showing in the wideness of his gaze and in the sudden freeze of his posture and his idle movements. "Who the hell's gonna be doing the running?" he asks, and then he pauses, finding Jordon's face with his gaze and matching the pieces together in his head. They're pieces of his own making, all scattered up in a jumble of thoughts behind that shaved hair and those white teeth and the whites of his brown eyes. They aren't real components of the world, these thoughts, and I can see in his eyes the same sort of thing that happens to Kenny when his mind is stuck and his head isn't on right. _'It was a good thing you did, Kenny. You're alright, man — you're okay.'_

 _'Fuck it, Lee. I ain't alright. You know that better than anyone.'_

A blade is in Dwayne's hand now, its tip twirling against his coarse thumb and pricking the skin with a dot of clean red as his mouth goes: "I can go alone to the station, come back at three at night to the convenience store near Buckner —"

"That isn't a good idea." Jordon snaps the sentence from his mouth as if it were a knife in his belt, jabbing it between the words of the other man, stopping his thoughts and the speed of his reckless mouth. Jordon's dark skin matches that of the other man, though the color is more matte in the night, the sweat on his skin failing to reflect the moonlight. The beads on his braids — the white, blue, silver ones — do that plenty well enough. "We've got to find some way that we can get there together, 'cause you and I aren't going alone."

There's a harsh laugh that splits Dwayne's mouth and shows his gleaming white teeth, leaving them vulnerable to the coolness of the air. "You don't trust me on my own? Really?" His eyes are soft and his brows are neutral as he peers at Jordon from under his hood, and his hand lifts to his chin, his fingers wrapping with brief lightness to cover his mouth as if he's been told a ridiculous joke at a party, "You do get that I was fully raised and educated before you and I were ever —"

"I do." Jordon says, his eyes firm, his hand lifted to the breeze, unmoving and terse before he slowly brings it back down. He takes his eyes elsewhere, looking like he's marking down the picture of the streets in his mind, his thoughts playing with some memory in the foreground of his conscious. "The night hasn't aged far enough for us to conclude that they've already been killed," he murmurs, and it's like he's talking to the blood staining the unlit street. He refocuses on Dwayne with a bit of disappointment tracing his expression, like he's decided something; like he's earned a bit of knowledge which doesn't bode well for anyone but nobody at all. "The sun was far too bright before the stars came about. Neither of us can guarantee that Ryan got the station fortified before the hoard got worse. "

Dwayne takes his lip into his mouth, and for just a moment he brings his eyes to Jordon's and places the emotion he sees in his friend. His glance moves like he's jotting down notes in his mind before he takes his eyes away again. He doesn't talk.

Jordon's mouth has disappeared behind his fingertips as he holds the heel of his hand to his chin, and everything blurs into the dark around me. The color of the beads wavers just in my sight, catching the heavy light of the stars 'till that's all I can see of the guy, and I hear sadness in his voice like thick oil under the belly of a beaten car. "Fuck," Jordon breathes from beneath his palm, the hills of his voice wet and quiet. "He had a daughter. A little girl, three feet tall, who still sucked her thumb after the sun was down and everything in the city was dark. There may be a chance that she made it out of the station when her daddy passed on." It sounds like his mind's strolled off-track, 'cause there's hope in his voice next, and I haven't heard the sound of hope in a long while. "Wonder if she's looking for me."

"She's probably gone, too, Jordon. They're all dead," Dwayne says with a shake of the head, and there's a twinge of something rueful in the bend of his lips as breath passes his mouth and he flashes his teeth hesitantly in a show of some half-covered pain he's got burrowing around inside him. He takes his eyes over his shoulder, checking behind him, letting the silence creep up for a moment too long to feel comfortable. "We've got no fucking place to go."

The two of them keep rambling on, their half-figured plans passing their lips and taking stabs at the air, their feet shuffling closer together every few minutes with each time that their voices get a little more loud and hurried. They never pass the whisper barrier, which is a thing I'm frankly thankful for. They bring the past up more than a few times, and it takes even me, a wounded man, only a moment to understand that the past is something important as fuck to these two. They're wrapped all up in something they can't get out of and things have transpired too soon for them to even consider the consequences of leaving the last few hours of their lives in the dark.

"Ryan's fucking dead, Jordon, damn — where are we gonna go? If you wanna save the people at the station, how the _hell_ are we gonna get there? I'm right behind you, man, but you ain't thinking hard enough. _This_ guy is _dead_ weight. We can't move."

'Ryan'. They've been mentioning this guy like he's a friend; like they know him well or at least are concerned for his condition. I can't pick up on any names — can't remember any. I know they've mentioned him before. They've mentioned multiple people. _Shit._ Lee, these are clues, this is important, get your head out of the fucking dreams and stay awake.

My eyes flip shut before I can stop them. The dark is back, darker than the sky at night, devoid of stars and of sound beyond the noises of the walkers in the roads — in the crevices and alleys between the abandoned buildings and large lots. Everything is out and the snow in the dream is black. It stings the soles of my feet and devours my skin and I can't stop it; can't stop it. It won't go away — not even when I blink. Not even when I scream. I can't pull my pistol and shoot it, so I just breathe. I hurt and burn and pull the air back in, then out, then in, then out, in, out, in, out.

A heavy gasp chafes the skin of my throat when I feel a cold hand on me, there and gone. I'm knocked awake by sound and movement and the light colors of the world are brighter than they were when I closed my eyes. Noise is in my ears, loud and heavy, and it's been going on for a while, storming in, hitting me now through the blur of my mind. The sound comes in chasing the thoughts louder than it should, 'cause the stars are blinding me and the air of night is sharp and cold. Gotta keep my head out of the goddamn dreams. Gotta keep above ground.

"I ain't fucking goin' nowhere!" The voice swims into the air, escaping the obscurity and climbing to a hushed yell that I remember with a fresh clarity. Kenny's voice scratches my ribcage and sticks my mind in hot water, and my voice is a thing that only manages to roll just off my tongue in a groan before falling to the grass, being eaten by quiet and shadows. He's got his gun in both his hands and his pale fingers cover the trigger, cold and certain, much more angry than when his eyes were less like glass and his skin was more like stone than fire. Back when Duck was leant against that fucking tree, Kenny was more like a statue than a man, and his heart was on the ground in front of him, a mess of memories, black and lost.

The muzzle of his pistol catches and holds the light; keeps Dwayne's temple as its target. "Is he dead?" There's no control — not in his voice, not in his edges or his eyes. "Is he _fucking_ dead?!"

"Why the fuck would we kill him when we busted our asses trying to keep him alive?" Dwayne's knife is below his own chin, held in front of his face so the whiteness of his teeth is reflected in the silver blade. He's got it held like it can do something; like its sharpness, its length, its resilience can deflect the bite of any bullet that blasts from the nose of Kenny's gun. His eyelids are like hoods and sweat casts a glitter over his skin — sweat and a bit of blood that wasn't there before I fell asleep. "Get your gun out of my face, man. You don't wanna shoot me right now. If you know this guy, tell me how — right now — or you can take the fuck off where you came from."

"Kenny," I squeeze out, and the sound is hoarse and harsh and I feel like it's too quiet for anyone's distracted ears to pick up over the sound of their own selfish anger. Kenny's eyes shift from underneath the bill of his cap. His face stills and the lines soften. I move myself higher on the bench and my legs scramble in the old dirt and hurt when they try to lift me. Pain shoots from my arm, seizing my spine and body, and I hold my shoulder and give up on saying anything more. God, at least I can do that much; sit up and focus. Good enough. I'm alive now; maybe I'll make it a little bit longer.

"God, Lee," Kenny breathes. There's almost a smile underneath that moustache, but it's gone quick. The overwhelming pain in my arm doesn't let me return it. Shadows turn his face as dark as the gun in his hands. I catch myself pleading him not to do anything stupid and the words are stuck in my head, swimming and beating on the inside of my skull like a headache.

Kenny lifts his eyes over Dwayne's shoulder where Jordon stands like a shadow with a hand extended, the thing he's holding covered in the black of the dark. The only sign of his identity is the shuffle of the beads over his shoulders, and he stands close enough to Dwayne to crane his neck and whisper something, firm as if he wouldn't feel right if he were any farther away. Kenny's eyes grow smaller, his brows furrowing and lips pursing slightly harder. His words are quick and harsh and his brows lift in realization just as soon as his face hardens like a rock. "Where the fuck did you get that gun?" He shakes his pistol. " _Where?_ Did you fucking take it from him?"

Dwayne gives Jordon's words no room, but I've got a feeling that the other man had no intention of saying anything to begin with. "You answer the question I asked you." From beneath the blue hood, he pushes his upper lip in dominance and a star's light catches the wet film on his teeth. "Just tell us so we can all fucking move on."

"I ain't interested in movin' on with you assholes," Kenny says, and he keeps his gun at the level of his eyes, moving it like he's trying to find a way to aim at both of them at once. There's a darkness in his eyes that isn't the fault of the time of night or the shadow of his cap. Anger's caked on thick in his expression. "Why in the fuck would he be dying right now if you just got done saving his life?"

Jordon lifts the gun — my gun — into one of his hands and holds it over his shoulder with a loose grip. The black metal lowly flickers, still and almost harmless in his hand. "He was bitten on a sidewalk next to a fence," he says, and he pulls something from the dark, his hand revealing an object small and curved, white like paper and stained with blood. "Dropped this hat before he fell to the ground."

I reach my hand out to take it and my skin tingles and my bones quaver. Everything feels unsteady and the motions of my arm seem unnatural when I peel the hand from my shoulder; take it from the tourniquet and the blood and let the wound feel the bite of the air. Jordon brings his eyes to me with a tentative turn of his head, his demeanor showing reluctance to take any of his attention off of Kenny. "Give it here," I tell him, and the pressure in my chest lessens when he does.

I just take a moment to look at it. For a minute, there are no drops of blood accumulating on the iron bench underneath my body, staining my skin and side and clothes and draining the life out of me with every passing pause. I can almost see the hat on Clementine's head; see her smile when I feel the texture of the cotton on my fingertips. I see her grin in my mind, right before me, radiant in those wonderful stars, and then I see her stolen by a man I thought I could trust. The anger makes my chest hot.

"You cut off his fuckin' arm!" Kenny fumes, face twitching, and though his gun is down and in his belt, his hands open and close and stretch, reflective with sweat. "You — you couldn't have waited to at least fuckin' _see_ —"

"If we waited to cut it, he would be dead right now," Dwayne says, and his voice is hissed between his teeth, sharp as the knife he holds in his hand, loose and skillful near his thigh like he's adopted it as a part of himself.

I hardly hear what he says next. Jordon turns away and I pull the hat close, studying the 'D' on its surface and remembering the talkie, the boat, the sickness, the open window and its drapes blowing in that goddamn afternoon wind so many hours ago. The minutes feel like fucking weeks, all charging so fast that death can't take too much longer. "Kenny, that motherfucker took her."

No-one seems to hear 'cause no-one seems to be listening. Dwayne's got his eyes stuck to Kenny in thought, the glint in his gaze stemming from the thick yards of thoughts running over the surface of his expression. "We caught it early, probably as early as we could've. We cut him fast and tried to stop the bleeding," he says, and his eyebrows squinch when he pulls his attention to the glittering black pool collecting on the ground under my arm, drizzling slowly between the metal bars like a dripping storm drain. It's the one time I've seen his eyes focused on any part of me. 'Till now, it's been corner glances and brief sweeps of his gaze, like I'm some irrelevant thing in the way of a goal. It doesn't last long, and his eyes are on Jordon's, meeting the other man's worry with a cool look of disregard.

Dwayne isn't looking at Kenny and his blade is down for a moment. His mouth moves independent of his mind: a throwaway comment, a no-brainer. "I don't think you've dealt with a bite before."

His lips aren't closed when Kenny's fist slams him in the jaw, pushing his face in the other direction, taking the sweat from his skin and making the starlight catch the slickness of broken flesh. There's this cry, this panicked, swallowed thing that's shoved down into Dwayne's throat. He spits a dark mass near the street, and in it, two sparkling white teeth shimmer on the sidewalk. There's just a moment — just a quick, smooth instant of time — and Jordon's hands are on Ken's shoulders and the side of his neck and a fist has jerked the bridge of the other man's nose from its place. Streams of blood stain the white shirt and move down the crevices of the fisherman's neck in clean rows by the time Kenny's hands are on his knees and his breath is spent.

I try to push myself to a level position on the bench and reach my hand to push the grime of sleep from my eyes, looking at Kenny, checking to see if he's okay as best I can. I can't move; can't stand, and the blood on his face is worrying me. Kenny's got his head lowered and his face covered by the dark of the shadows. Branches whisper up above, and there's a desperate sound in the tone of his tears — the defeated noise of a man whose son and wife are dead and gone forever. I've heard it before and I recognize it now, and the pain rolling through my body is what keeps me from doing shit to stop it. He smothers the sound with a hand, his hat on the ground, his eyes on the tears. "You don't fucking talk about that shit," he says. His voice is low; animalistic. "Never."

Jordon's got Kenny's gun when he pulls himself away. I see it in his hands, the shine of starlight on the metal playing with the sheen of Kenny's blood in Jordon's palm. It's why he's so calm when he crouches to his knees. It's why he turns his back to Kenny, taking his friend's teeth off the ground and dropping them into his pocket like they're pennies in a fountain. His eyes are on Dwayne as if nothing had happened but a mere accident of injury, and I can see the thoughts narrowing in his eyes. He pushes Kenny and the memory of him away, a manifestation of 'out of sight, out of mind,' and doesn't seem keen to resume any violence. Speaking to Dwayne, Jordon's voice is lower than I've heard it yet; gentler than I remember. I can't tell with the shadows of their bodies, but it seems like he's grasped Dwayne's hand before it's pulled away.

Dwayne lifts himself to his feet on shaky legs and shakes his head hard at any whispered questions. He grunts, breathing choked and open-mouthed breaths past a bleeding tongue, and his hand clutches his jaw and the darkness of his skin shimmers with the rivulets of tears breaking from the corners of his eyes. His blade is in his hand when he lifts himself to his feet. Kenny isn't looking. He doesn't seem to hear the world or to be focused on shit but the hat in his hands.

Dwayne gives me a look lined with bemusement, and if I were any crazier, I'd think I'm wearing a clown mask with the way his eyes clamp onto me, wet and stained with physical pain and a cold irritation. "I'm not gonna do shit to him," he says to me — _at_ me, more like it, in a way that fills me with guilt. It looks like he's stabbing himself when he shoves his blade into his belt. He turns to Kenny and gulps down the pain in his mouth. "Good for you, you got a punch in. You must feel proud, right, like you can hurt people who ain't done shit wrong."

Kenny's quiet for a moment, but the silence is so thick, he might as well be screaming 'till he turns red. "I —"

"We don't need to fill the air with more noise. We're in the dark. We're in the open." It seems to burden Jordon, opening himself to Kenny, but he's got all the guns in the area. It wouldn't surprise me if he started looking down on Kenny right this second. "Lee, as long as you know him, the two of you can work this out and get us all to a good place."

I clear my throat of phlegm and try to ignore the way my skin crawls; the way my body feels colder and colder with every breath of the wind. "Get us to the house, Kenny," I say. The sound of my voice pulls me back to the Old Days for a moment, and I see the faces of old students milling around the classroom, taking papers into their hands and jacking all my pencils; shoving them into the last working pencil sharpener in the school. Feels weird, taking this sudden authority, especially being a man without an arm. Ken's in no place to defy anything or anyone. "Now, Kenny. Anything that needs to be said can be said in front of the group."

Kenny takes his hat into his hands, and I'm just about convinced that the wind blows harder in the dark. Someone throws me onto someone else's back, and I think it's Jordon who's doing the brunt of the work and Kenny who's helping. Dwayne's got my gun in his hands when he meets the sidewalk, and he walks in the front of the group with his brows creased and his eyes moving in slow strokes over the world like the night sky is a painting. I can imagine that if one were to see us from afar, they would remark on our bobbing heads and slow motions. They wouldn't see the new heaviness on Kenny's face or feel the hot anger in his skin. They wouldn't hear his murmured 'fucks' and bitten irritation at the whole predicament, and they sure as hell wouldn't feel the fury pulsing in his body.

They'd think we're walkers. In the dark, everything looks alike. Clothes are ragged and dirty and scents all smell the same.

Jordon never touches Kenny's gun — not once. At the door, he hands it off and Kenny takes it like he's getting ready to scold a thief, but there's a feeling in my chest that thanks Jordon for being civil when nobody else has the fucking courage. There's no light in the house when the door opens — just Christa's hurried eyes and the shock in her open mouth when she pulls the door open and sees me draped over a stranger's back, Kenny standing in front with his gun held loose and his face colored red with stress and blood.

"I was bit." It must be my voice. I don't recognize it.

Ben shows his face. It's a stupid move when Kenny's like this, but I think we've all had our fill of violence. His voice is high, tainted with that aching noise that always seems to come around when someone's been drained of their relief. "Who the hell are they?"

"We helped," says Jordon, and when he holds out a hand, Omid's chiseled himself into the doorway and has those huge cow eyes blown up wide before his mouth sinks into a weary smile. His tawny hand is outstretched and Kenny bats it away before almost dropping me with his sudden movement.

"Stop with the fucking nice shit." He pushes himself past the door; bulldozes all the people. The stress and heaviness in his demeanor are evident in all the ways his face falls and his shoulders collapse.

Jordon has to steady me in his arms for a moment. He's almost dropped me, but no-one seems to notice but Ben, who helps grab my good arm when Kenny takes off into the kitchen. He's opening and closing cabinets and the sound in the house vibrates with the tension when he's disappeared. Jordon pulls into the house on tentative feet. Dwayne's somewhere; Omid closes the door, calling after Christa in this sunken voice and talking over the pained murmur of Dwayne when he supposedly spots the injuries.

"Did you hurt him? Who the _hell_ do you think you are?" It's coming from the kitchen, ringing in Christa's voice, but the sounds are all so distant.

I'm set down on this chair in the living room — this sofa. My nerves are more like nerves now, twitching and feeling the cold; feeling the pain, sending grunts to spike off my tongue when my arm goddamn throbs. "Sit him up; let him sleep…" The voices and sounds smear together like paint on a canvas.

There was this picture that I got once — it was back in the Old Days era. It was given to me by a girl named Elizabeth who had big teeth; glasses; freckles spotting her face and dotting her arms and neck. It was a painting of the Civil War, and it was frankly one of the most horrible works of art I've ever seen. The faces were smeared with thumbprints and the main color of the whole piece was brown, a bland color in the sense of art. The voices sound a lot like how the artwork looked: muted and stiff, boisterous and faded.

"Wake him up tomorrow."

I think someone in the dream says that. It doesn't make sense falling off Clementine's lips, but I listen; I hear it louder than I've heard anything in awhile. Someone else's hand clamps over her mouth and leads her down the street along the iron fence.


End file.
